Archive for the ‘plant biology’ Category

On January 12, we got hold of a retraction at AGRIVITA Journal of Agricultural Science a small journal published by the University of Brawijaya in Indonesia.

We went about our usual process, emailing authors and editors looking for more details. The retraction mentioned a double publication. It gave enough details that we’re fairly sure the earlier publication was this one, “Performance of Korean Soybean Varieties in Indonesia,” in the Journal of the Korean Society of International Agriculture.

However, when we went back to write up this post, we noticed something odd. The retraction notice of “Expressions of Introduced Soybean Varieties from Korea” was no longer to be found! And the link to the paper itself now forwards you on to the main page for Agrivita.

This story began as a report of a one-off case of potential predatory practice last month, and has escalated to an official call to disband an entire international editorial board, and an accusation against the editor of mass-scale nepotism and other publishing misconduct.

The Journal of Biomedicine and Biotechnology — now BioMed Research International — has retracted a 2012 paper by a group from China who seem really to have admired a related 2007 article by a team from the Scripps Research Institute — and evidently other work, as well.

Bauhinia saksuwaniae, a new species from northeastern Thailand is described and illustrated. It appears to be an endemic and endangered species. The new species is obviously distinct from all other species of Thai Bauhinia in having large orbicular persistent bracteoles forming a cup-shape and enclosing a young floral bud.

An Elsevier journal has taken “the exceptional step of ceasing to communicate” with a scientist-critic after a series of “unfounded personal attacks and threats.” The move means that the journal, Scientia Horticulturae, will not review any papers that include the critic, Jaime A. Teixeira da Silva, as an author.

The group has now published a paper in PeerJ following their investigation into what went wrong. Ronald tells us the new paper, titled “The Xanthomonas Ax21 protein is processed by the general secretory system and is secreted in association with outer membrane vesicles,” Read the rest of this entry »

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Alejandra Bravo and Mario Soberon, a wife-husband research team at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) who received sanctions — later lifted — for manipulating images in a number of papers have corrected another article.

Take “Use of digital photography from unmanned aerial vehicles for estimation of leaf area index in onion (Allium cepa L.),” a study published earlier this year in the European Journal of Agronomy by researchers from Spain: Read the rest of this entry »

The article, “Two novel bioactive glucosinolates from Broccoli (Brassica oleracea L. var. italica) florets,” came from a group in South Korea and has yet to be cited, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge. But according to the retraction notice, after publication critics pointed out serious problems with the work. To wit: Read the rest of this entry »